The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  “Did you find anything?” Lucia asked from the top of the embankment.

  Leonardo showed her the lighter.

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else,” he said, climbing up the embankment.

  “You’re pale.”

  “You too. Because we’re hungry. And it’s very cold. We must find somewhere before dark and light a fire. Now that we can do that.”

  “Was that house not all right?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Leonardo said, picking up the suitcase.

  Lucia must have understood because she took the bag of sanitary pants and headed down the track. She had only gone a few steps when she turned to her brother.

  “I’ve found something,” Alberto said.

  “What?”

  “Come and see.”

  They went toward the autostrada, which was now almost invisible in the dusk. Alberto was walking diagonally across a field. They could detect the rustle of granoturco stubble under the snow. When they reached a deep irrigation channel, Alberto stopped and pointed at something in the ditch. Leonardo climbed cautiously down the snow-covered bank and studied the few centimeters of frozen water covering the bottom: imprisoned in the ice were pieces of corncob flung to the edge of the field by the combine harvester.

  “Well done,” Leonardo said. “Very well done.”

  That evening they heated the granoturco they had managed to retrieve on their fire. Alberto had hoped to make popcorn, but the cobs were so sodden they would only roast or turn into a mush resembling polenta. The place they had found for the night was an old hut belonging to the water board, on which a graffiti artist had drawn the impertinent face of a small boy with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. The place consisted of a single room crossed by a spider’s web of pipes of various sizes. The sheet metal door had been forced and the place had probably served as a refuge for others like themselves: the concrete floor had been insulated with rubbish and cardboard against the cold, and on the whole they could consider themselves lucky that it was clean and not too damp. It also had a high window through which the smoke from their bonfire could escape, leaving the air breathable.

  Before lying down to sleep, they talked about how many kilometers they must have covered that day, and how clever Alberto had been to find the maize. The boy was the first to fall asleep, while Leonardo and Lucia stayed awake for a long time listening to him tossing restlessly and dreaming he was quarreling with someone to whom he then tearfully apologized.

  When Lucia also crashed out, Leonardo spent some time watching the fire, feeding it from time to time with more wood. He would have liked to leaf through a few pages to make him sleepy, but all his and Lucia’s books had been left in the Polar, so he took the box of letters out of the children’s suitcase and reread a couple. This had the effect of annoying him profoundly and he was tempted to throw all of them on the fire, but he did not do this because he had to concentrate on holding back his tears. In fact, he now felt sure for the first time that both Clara and Alessandra must be dead and that he would never see either of them again. He imagined their bodies tossed into some field with their clothes ripped apart, their trousers around their ankles, and a parliament of crows conferring nearby.

  He gave way to heavy tears, and then he dried his face and went on weeping in a more controlled manner. In the end, exhausted, he slept deeply and dreamlessly until morning.

  As soon as he woke he lit the fire and moved the stale maize near to heat it, and then he went out to stretch his legs. It might have been seven o’clock, perhaps eight, and the day was going to be fine and very cold. The sky was a uniform blue and the light reflected from the snow was already blinding.

  He sat on the railway line stroking Bauschan and removing several thorny burrs the dog had collected from the brambles he liked to bury himself in. He talked to him about writers who had written stories with snow as an essential feature, and Bauschan gazed into his green eyes, until distracted by a noise from the cabin.

  They had breakfast around the fire. Alberto had woken up with encrusted eyes, a sign that his conjunctivitis was getting worse, but they had nothing to clean them with. After eating his portion of maize, Leonardo wandered around the cabin for half an hour looking for a container in which to boil snow so as to get some more or less sterile water, but all he could find was an empty plastic bottle. After walking on for two hours they came across several carcasses of cows in a plantation of poplars beside the railway and stopped to look at them without going near. The cows must have been dead for some time because their stomachs were swollen and the black patches on their coats had faded almost to gray. Even so their mouths and eyes seemed to be moving. On closer inspection it became clear that the effect was created by several small birds hopping on the animals’ faces. Leonardo and the children made the most of the break by taking off their jackets and tying them around their waists, and then they went on without discussing what they had seen.

  Before noon they reached a group of houses. As on the previous day, Leonardo went off alone to inspect them and came back an hour later with a saucepan and a small bag with a little flour in it.

  “We’ll boil some water,” he said. “Then you can wash your eyes.”

  Alberto said neither yes or no and went to sit a little way off on the rails. He had grown much thinner in the last two days, and his legs seemed to be dancing inside his trousers like pencils in a sock. He had a red rash around his mouth that he continually scratched.

  Leonardo lit the fire. This was not difficult because brushwood, ideal for starting bonfires, was growing beside the track.

  As soon as the water boiled he dipped his handkerchief in it and took it to Alberto who, asking no questions, cleaned his eyes. Leonardo used the rest of the water to mix with the flour, using the suitcase as a work surface. The result was a round grayish mass that he put into the pan and left on the fire for five minutes, before stirring it and putting it back to cook for the same length of time again. The yellow disk that emerged was christened “focaccia.” They all ate a piece, even Bauschan. Lucia asked if they could make another. Leonardo said yes, but that they should only eat half now, leaving the rest for supper. Lucia nodded and smiled. Her face was magnificent: the sun and the cold had given it color, and her eyes had never before looked so warm and deep.

  While fiddling with the fire to try and keep it burning, Lucia saw two people.

  “Someone’s coming!” she said, getting up.

  Leonardo put down the pan and studied the figures approaching along the railway track. “If we can see them,” he thought, “they must see us; there’s no escape.”

  “We need to discuss this,” he told Lucia, who was collecting their things.

  “But we don’t know who they are!”

  “If we want food, sooner or later we’ll have to trust someone.”

  By now the two figures were more substantial. Leonardo was sure one was a woman in red.

  “I say let’s avoid them,” Lucia said.

  Leonardo turned to Alberto. The boy was using his hand to shade his eyes from the sun as he looked at the two people.

  “What do you say, Alberto?”

  “We’ve seen some dead cows in the fields,” Leonardo said.

  The man shook his head as he continued to stir the soup on the stove. Beans, cabbage, and large pieces of gray meat could be seen in the pan. The smell was hot and inviting.

  “This is good meat,” he said, licking the spoon before returning it to his shirt pocket. “We had some yesterday evening.” Then he signed to the woman to bring the plates. Until now she had restricted herself to gazing tenderly at Lucia and Alberto, but now she put on the ground the three metal plates she had been holding on her lap.

  “It seems to us,” the man explained, as he poured soup onto the plates, “that the planes are dropping some substance onto built-up areas. I have no idea what it is, but it’s certainly not harmful to humans; I’m a doctor and I haven’t noticed anything
strange. It only has this effect on cows. It’s extraordinary the way game and birds are proliferating.”

  The woman handed them their plates. The children thanked her and began eating. Leonardo balanced his on his knee and looked at the people walking about around them, about thirty of them. Twenty more were sitting with their backs against the wall of a large shed, enjoying the sun. The building that was their home was in the middle of nowhere and had probably been a warehouse used by men working on the high speed trains. Even when they first arrived no one had come up to ask them who they were, where they came from or where they were going. Those who crossed their path limited themselves to a disinterested glance.

  “For two weeks we had terrible weather,” the woman said. “It never stopped raining or snowing. But look what a glorious day today.”

  Leonardo nodded. She must once have been attractive, but her body seemed to have suffered much more than her husband’s from recent events. Her double chin seemed unrelated to the rest of her tall, slender figure.

  “Have you been here long?” Leonardo asked.

  The man smiled. He was obviously well over fifty, but he still had a slim, athletic body. Seeing him approaching in his vest with his pullover tied around his waist, Leonardo had thought he might be a former tennis professional or yachtsman, but he had introduced himself as Dottore Barbero, a dermatologist.

  “A couple of months already,” the doctor said, “but only a few days more. Signor Poli, who owns this place, is getting permits for us.”

  “For Switzerland?”

  The man and woman exchanged a smile.

  “They won’t let anyone into Switzerland anymore,” the man said, “but Signor Poli has good contacts in France. His wife worked at the embassy.”

  Leonardo put the first spoonful into his mouth.

  “My compliments,” he said. “This is excellent.”

  “Thank you, but I can’t claim any credit for it. It wasn’t my turn in the kitchen yesterday.”

  For a few minutes they ate in silence, watched by the couple. The two were sitting on a little wooden bench they had carried out of the warehouse when they had gone in to fetch the food and the small stove. Leonardo and the children had freed several ties from the snow near the railway and were treating them like the lowest tiers of a stadium. Bauschan was sitting comfortably at their feet. Several of the people walking around the building were now going back into it. Leonardo had noticed that no one had gone more than about twenty meters from the building and that there were no old people among them. He had also noticed that some were smoking real cigarettes.

  “Do you think it would be possible for us to spend tonight here?” he asked, putting down the spoon on his empty plate.

  “I think it might be,” Barbero said, “but you’ll have to discuss it with Signor Poli. He comes at about six to bring food and whatever else we’ve ordered. He also leaves two armed men here for the night: security’s included in the price.”

  “May I ask the price?”

  “Five hundred per person,” the doctor said. “Chocolate, tuna, tea, and specialties extra. Gas canisters” the man indicated the little stove “are also extra. On the other hand, heat and water are included. There are two showers and they heat the water two days a week. Compared to the rest of life out there that’s a four-star hotel, don’t you agree?”

  Leonardo smiled back, but he thought it odd the man had not said “five-star”; why had he not automatically pushed the hyperbole to the limit?

  Rhetorical exaggeration had always fascinated him. Once he had flown to New York to attend a conference organized by a famous Jewish-American writer who was soon to die of a tumor. This man, who had always previously been known for his reserve and modesty, had asked his press agents to invite five hundred writers from all over the world, a list he personally drew up. He wanted to give a final conference for these five hundred colleagues, and admit no one else other than a journalist he played golf with once a week, a Peruvian girl working on a thesis about him, a boy from Cameroon doing the same, plus his barber, his present companion, and a class of children from an elementary school in New Jersey, where he had lived since childhood.

  The conference was held in a Broadway theater that had long been closed but which the writer had reopened at his own expense. This had surprised many people, since one of the most reliable rumors about him was that he had been stingy to a maniacal degree. Before the keynote speech, fixed for 8 p.m., a small buffet was offered, so minimal that it was restricted to white wine in cartons, Mexican cheese, and pineapple. To administer these refreshments two middle-aged ladies, possibly the writer’s neighbors, had been recruited. One poured the wine into glasses while the other looked after a soup tureen containing a strawberry-colored liquid, which gave off balsamic fumes.

  That night, in his room in the large cheap hotel where the writer had quartered his guests, Leonardo had grieved for the imminent death of this short, pockmarked, and unusually talented man. He had assumed that despite everything he had written, despite his hard-won style and the acuteness with which he had been able to thread words together making them resound like lines from Homer, that all this would be completely forgotten. The memories of those present at the conference would not be enough, and even the notes he had seen some people taking during his magnificent lecture on hyperbole, ranging from the lowest to the highest, like Glenn Gould playing Bach, would be lost in minds packed with their own stories and appointments, soon reduced to the condition of an aquarelle left out too long in bad weather.

  “Would you like some more?” the woman asked.

  “Thank you,” the children said.

  Signora Barbero filled their plates again, then put her hand on her husband’s shoulder as she stood watching Lucia and Alberto beginning to eat again. She was wearing velvet trousers, a beige broad-stitch sweater, and red moon boots with white laces. Her husband had a check shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows and trekking trousers. Everyone Leonardo had seen there had been wearing warm, well-made clothes.

  “Are many people staying here?” he asked.

  “About sixty at the moment,” the man said. “But ten left last week. Their permits arrived just when they were about to run out of money.”

  The woman noticed Leonardo had finished his soup, and so without saying anything she took his plate and filled it again with what was left in the pan. A couple of people were still leaning against the wall; the rest had gone in. The sun had set very quickly, as happens in winter.

  After another spoonful or two, Leonardo put his plate on the ground and Bauschan quickly came to lick up what was left. The doctor touched his mustache without trying to hide mild disappointment, but his wife smiled and placed her hands on her heart.

  “The little one,” she said, “he was hungry too.”

  They spent a couple of hours resting on the camp beds of the doctor and his wife. These were military pallets, but after several nights on the floor they seemed very comfortable. As always, Alberto was the first to fall asleep, then Lucia, while Leonardo lay listening to the voices reverberating inside the warehouse roof. Some of the guests were lying on their beds, while others were in what Signora Barbero called the “daytime area,” that is to say the two tables where they ate their meals and could sit on a dirty sofa and a few armchairs, pretending they were in the hall of a great hotel or the waiting lounge of an airport or, more intimately, in their own homes. Everyone talked in a low voice so as not to disturb those resting or to save energy. There were also a couple of small children, one breastfeeding from his mother. The other, a three-year-old, seemed to be alone with his father.

  “Papa?”

  Leonardo turned. Lucia was looking at him from the next bed. She had one hand under her head and the other by her side. Apart from her eyes, she now seemed in every respect a full-grown woman.

  “Do you think we’ll be able to stay here for a while?”

  “Maybe tonight, but tomorrow we’ll have to go on. We have no mone
y.”

  Lucia slipped a hand under the covers and pulled out a bundle of banknotes folded in two.

  “Where did you hide those?”

  “Same place as the others.”

  “If they’d searched you . . .”

  “Would I have had to hand them over?”

  Leonardo looked at her without knowing quite what to say about the two possibilities that came to mind.

  “Would you like to stay?”

  “They seem like respectable people. Alberto says he’d like to stay too.”

  It occurred to Leonardo that “respectable people” must be an expression Lucia had picked up from her mother’s second husband. For several days now Leonardo had been feeling a deep, if (to be fair) unjustified, resentment of this man. A sentiment he was ashamed of but which made him feel alive. I’m getting wicked, he thought, and I’ve come a long way down that path.

  “If we can, we’ll stay a few days,” he said.

  “If we have enough money, we can stay.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Not now.”

  “Alberto?”

  “Asleep. We must get him to wash.”

  “Tomorrow, OK?”

  “OK.”

  While the central-heating pipes were starting up, they heard the sound of a car approaching.

  Signor Poli was a man of primitive appearance, short-legged and with disheveled gray hair. He had a suede jacket open on his prominent stomach, a green pullover, and jeans that puckered just below his knees. On the whole, he could have passed as a shepherd used to spending long solitary summer days in mountain pastures or the proprietor of an engineering workshop with little in the way of formal studies to his name but an innate talent for getting others to work.